Jimmy Carter Illustration, President Number 39

“I’ve been publicly hammered by friends and stranger’s alike for saying that ‘I like Jimmy Carter’. I have been jeered by large crowds for saying this; I have been mocked in print by liberal pundits and other Gucci people; I have been called a brain damaged geek by some of my best and oldest friends; my own wife threw a knife at me on the night of the Wisconsin primary when the midnight radio station stunned us both with a news bulletin from a CBS station in Los Angeles, saying that earlier announcements by NBS and ABC regarding Mo Udall’s narrow victory over Carter in Wisconsin were not true…”.

This was none other than Hunter S Thompson writing for Rolling Stone in the mid seventies in his highly influential article “Jimmy Carter and the Great Leap of Faith”.

Hunter S. Thompson first came across Jimmy Carter when the then governer of Georgia gave a speech to a group of Southern Lawyers. In this address, Carter spoke of the state of inequality and corruption in society today and summed it with the following words,

“I was in the governor’s mansion for 2 years, enjoying the services of a very fine cook, who was a prisoner – a woman. One day she came to me, after she got over her 2 years of timidity, and said, “Governor, I would like to borrow $250 from you.”

I said, “I’m not sure that a lawyer would be worth that much.”

She said, ” I don’t want to hire a lawyer. I want to pay the judge.”

Hunter himself recalled it by stating that it was “a king-hell bastard of a speech, and by the time it was over he had rung every bell in the room.”

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Jimmy Carter was elected President of the United States in 1976, serving one term before losing out to Ronald Reagan.

Jimmy Carter now runs the Carter Foundation with his wife.
http://www.cartercenter.org/index.html